


Night Spectres

by HarpiaHarpyja



Series: Two Halves - Reylo Weekly Challenge Flash Fiction [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Flash Fiction, Force Bond (Star Wars), Gen, Kylo Ren Needs a Hug, Movie: Star Wars: The Last Jedi, POV Rey (Star Wars), Post-TLJ Speculation, Rey Really Needs a Hug, Reylo - Freeform, Reylo Weekly Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 07:29:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14159817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarpiaHarpyja/pseuds/HarpiaHarpyja
Summary: A week after reuniting with Resistance, Rey is plagued by nightmares of theSupremacyand struggling to cope with her new life as a rallying point of rebellion. As she inspects her healing wounds and contemplates taking a late-night shower, the Force bond opens for the first time since she last saw Kylo Ren on Crait.





	Night Spectres

**Author's Note:**

> My contribution to the third @two-halves-of-reylo Tumblr weekly challenge, “Scars” theme. 
> 
> In retrospect, this also 100% serves as a precursor to my “How Soon Unaccountable” series. Angsty space babes abound.

The young woman in the mirror is beginning to look more like herself. Rey leans nearer to the filmy glass and gently prods the bruise above her left eye. A week after the event that gave it to her, it has all but faded entirely. There are others on her body that are more stubborn—her back, ribs, knees, and shins all bear marks of the fight on the _Supremacy_ , and likely will for another week or so. The angry slice at the top of her right arm has scabbed over. It will leave a scar, which she supposes could have been prevented in better times. But the Resistance supply of medical necessities, and everything else it possesses, is dire. She would not have allowed the use of bacta for such a small thing even if it had been offered her.

She is grateful of the quiet afforded by the hour, which is either very late or very early. The new base is never silent during waking hours, and often not even at night. In spite of the reasons for her wakefulness, the unusual tranquility seems like a gift. Particularly when all she really wants to do is sneak a shower and go back to her bunk in the hopes of having at least another hour or two to rest her eyes, even if sleep continues to elude her.

People have stopped pressing Rey about what happened on the _Supremacy_. They take her lack of denial of the rumors they pick up in intercepted transmissions to mean there is nothing to deny: that she is responsible for Snoke’s death. They suppose she must be struggling to cope with the things she saw and did and will give more detailed accounts when she’s ready. At first she didn’t agree. She was coping fine, she told herself. Now, she thinks they are probably right. The nightmare that woke her tonight is not the first she’s had since Crait, and she knows it won’t be the last. 

Snoke inside her head, a grasping claw ripping here, tearing there, taking anything and everything because he can, leaving her nerves blazing and mind raw and aching. A body bisected by a beam of blue light, toppling from a throne, and the sharp sickening smell of cauterized flesh. The weight of the lightsaber in her hand as it enters body after body, the low sound of its hum always steady in the violence of thrust, swipe, parry, lunge. So little blood but red everywhere and that smell again and again and again. Ben, Kylo—she hasn’t decided how she thinks of him now, when she does, which is often—his face ashen and pupils blown in the aftermath of carnage. As fire falls around her, the way her heart and hopes crumble when she realizes that Luke was right: this would not go as she thought it must.

Sensory impressions, seared in memory. Each night her mind, stripped of waking rationality, brings her something new and uniquely terrible. Rey closes her eyes and takes a deep, centering breath. 

“Breathe,” she whispers roughly to herself as she releases it. “Come on. Rey, just . . . _breathe_.”

It’s hard tonight but she manages, and she shivers as the air stills. She feels something within her slip into alignment. _Better._ She again inspects the wound on her arm, frowns at the memories it calls up, resists the urge to pick at the scab, and begins to draw her shirt up over her head.

A man clears his throat somewhere behind her. Startled, Rey yelps and spins, tugging her shirt back into place. It’s him, standing against the wall with his eyes averted. Kylo. Ben. Kylo. Ben, she determines in the moment. It’s who he is. Better to think this way. It bolsters her belief that there is still a chance that she wasn’t wrong and that the Force is at work even in this. Still some reason, no matter how small, to hope for him.

That doesn’t mean she isn’t angry or hurting. She turns back to the mirror, where her face is taut with alarm. She can’t see him reflected behind her, even though he should be visible in the glass. But then he isn't really here, is he? Rey looks over her shoulder again to make sure this isn’t just her mind tricking her. Some new nightmare. He is still there, staring at her now. 

Her mind is working too slowly, and part of it stubbornly continues to insist that she is alone in the room. Unbidden, she remembers local lore on Jakku, of sand wraiths and night spectres. Ghosts. If you had the misfortune of encountering one, stories said, you were not to speak to it. If you did, it would stay, feed on you, haunt you, until you were never truly alone and the knowledge of it drove you mad. She doesn’t say anything.

He’s standing stiffly, and his voice is flat and low when he says, “I thought you were ignoring me on purpose.”

Rey considers doing just that. It would be easiest to splash her face with water from the sink and leave as if Ben isn’t here. She doesn’t feel like arguing, and that is the only way she can see this going. But she really does crave the singular prolonged solitude the shower would provide, and his presence puts a bump in that plan.

“Go away.” She immediately regrets saying it. Not because she doesn’t mean it, but because it’s a ridiculous request in the circumstances.

The look he gives her, like he can’t believe she just said that when she knows this is as much out of his control as it is out of hers, makes her even angrier. After a week of nothing, Rey was starting to think that their connection in the Force truly had died. Now she sees that this was just another simplistic, premature assumption. 

She has been standing hunched up against the sink basin as if Ben’s presence here frightens her. Which it doesn’t, so she forces herself to relax. It almost works.

“How’s your wound?” he asks as she straightens.

The question nettles her. Something in the way Ben inclines his chin when he asks, a flimsy pretense of superiority that she sees through and doesn't like. She isn’t sure how long he was watching her before he alerted her to his presence, but evidently it was long enough to see her examining her arm. He has no right to ask, as far as she is concerned.

“It’s nothing,” she says shortly, glaring at her own solitary reflection. “Like me, remember?”

Rey can’t help it. Reflexively, she turns to look at him, curious to see if her words get a reaction. She is pleased to find that he looks fleetingly abashed. 

But then his face hardens. “Is that supposed to hurt me?”

She’s not sure. It hurt her, when he said it on the _Supremacy_ , and she senses that it hurts him now to be reminded of his tactlessness. Why did she do that? She should be ignoring him. Instead she’s already being drawn out, so easily, and willfully makes it worse. “Does it?”

His only response is to take a few steps toward her.

“Don't you dare.” Her voice doesn't sound right, the way the room makes it echo slightly. She’s not even sure what she thinks he’s going to do. She just doesn’t want him nearer. “Stay where you are.”

Ben halts, so suddenly and completely that she almost thinks he’s run against a physical barrier. “Happy?”

Rey isn't sure if he means the question in reference to his stopping at her request, or to her situation at large, here with the Resistance. She suspects the latter.

“Yes.” A partial lie. She looks at him full on, and feels herself about to resort to his methods of deflection. Yet she’s been provoked, and she can’t stop herself. “You aren't.” 

He is impassive at first, but only just able to hold it. Then his mouth squirms and he turns the statement back on her, just as she knew he would. 

“And you're lying. I can feel it.”

“Then why ask? It's a stupid question.”

She isn't _un_ happy. The people here are important to her. She cares about them. Finn most especially, and Leia, too. They have never made her feel as if her place should be anywhere else. There is belonging here, but tempered by a sense she gets, a little more each day, that they view her as something other. Something with the power to lift stones with only a thought, or wield a legendary lightsaber with next to no training, or bring down the Supreme Leader of the First Order single-handedly. Something around which they can rebuild their hope and the rebel platform. Another Luke. And so, while they mean well, Rey knows everyone treats her differently since she returned. Except Finn, but even he has things he seems afraid to ask her. She can sense it, and that’s almost as bad. 

And there is her failure to save the man speaking to her now. It wasn’t her failure alone, but she’d placed so much on it that it weighs on her anyway. Mostly at night, when she has little else to distract her from it, and anything that might serve as a distraction—meditating, mending her saber, perusing ancient Jedi texts—only brings him more to mind. All these things accounted for, happiness is not something Rey considers within her grasp yet. 

Ben is rankled by her response for reasons she doesn't know. He takes another step toward her, then stops as if he forgot himself briefly. “If you hadn't attacked me—”

“If I hadn’t attacked you?” Rey cuts him off, pushing away from the sink and rounding off to his right, looking wide-eyed at him. She tries to keep her voice low, but it’s difficult in her mounting indignation. “ _Attacked_ you? I didn’t attack you!”

“Oh, no? Why else would you have tried to rip the lightsaber away?” He’s facing her off, arms stiff. His posture is all bluster, but his voice quavers. “If not betrayal?”

She would laugh, mostly out of shock, but she’s too aware of the seriousness of his accusation, and her throat constricts. Even if he is wrong, there is hurt in his eyes all over again. At least she isn’t alone in that. Rey refuses to give him any ground, and her mind races for an answer that isn’t hostile.

“I didn’t attack you,” she repeats, more calmly than the last time, but still piqued. “You think I want you dead? If that’s so, why would I have left you alive? I woke and found you unconscious. I could have ended it right there.” Her eyes fix on the scar that curves over his face and neck. She notes the way it starts as a fine line over his eyebrow, cuts deeper across his cheek, seams his jaw and throat, and though the rest is hidden from her view, she remembers the stark way it hooks over his chest as well. Ben notices the way she stares, and she doesn’t stop. She wants him to know that the intensity of her gaze is as much a reminder as her next words. “But I didn’t. Again.”

He visibly deflates and takes a step back, though his face is still tense, and his eyes are darting over her. She can’t tell what he’s thinking. Whatever it is, it’s troubling him deeply, and she doesn’t know why, but she longs to know it. There is a way she could find out. Not one she’s ever tried intentionally, and she doubts it would work now. She doesn’t want to revisit that moment in the interrogation room ever again, in spirit or otherwise, so she leaves Ben to his thoughts.

“I thought you’d gone back to Luke. That you’d brought him . . . given him the—” He isn’t even looking at her as he speaks, favoring the floor near her feet instead, and barely anything he is saying makes sense to her. He’s somewhere else right now. She doesn’t think she’s ever heard him at a loss like this, or seen him so confused. “To . . . but then he wasn’t even . . . no. No.”

She isn’t sure what to make of these half statements, so she ignores them. “I wanted the lightsaber, so that I could leave. I suppose I’d have . . . fought you, if you tried to stop me. But . . . what was I supposed to do? Let people I care about continue to die? Just watch? No. What you expected from me, it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.”

“What I _offered_ you,” he says, recovering suddenly, like she’s misspoken and he’s trying to help her remember the correct version of events. “When I asked you to join me, all I wanted—”

Rey shakes her head. “That wasn’t an offer. You assumed. You assumed after I’d faced . . . all that, and what you said to me, what I admitted, that I’d just—no. I’m not like you.”

“You assumed, too.” His voice is even, his eyes dark. He doesn’t elaborate, but he doesn’t need to. Rey knows exactly what she assumed would be the outcome of that day. Everything she told him in the turbolift, and everything she didn't. So much more. He must have some inkling. “You are like me. At least I can still admit that.”

“ _Stop_.” Turning on her heel, Rey stalks back toward the mirror, refusing to look at him. “I know. I _know_ that. Just stop.”

She hates this. She wishes he wasn’t at least a little bit right. She wishes the connection would close. She wishes she’d ignored him after all. She wishes he’d never told her he was here and just let her go on with what she was doing, decency be damned, and let the minutes pass in ignorance. She won’t be sleeping tonight, even if she tries. 

“What did you really expect?” she says.

He doesn’t answer, even after she gives him a few moments, and so she spins to demand he do so. He is no longer there. The connection has closed, leaving her alone again. Or as truly alone as she can ever be anymore, which in this moment is no comfort. Ben will be there, in the Force, always so close and yet undeniably separate until the next time they are made to appear before each other. Because now she knows—there will be a next time.

Rey scrubs her hands up and down her arms in a bid for focus, quickening the motion until it almost hurts. She stops with a sharp gasp as one hand jerks too high and pulls violently at the scabbed wound on her right arm. There isn’t any blood, but some of the yet-unhealed tissue is exposed, pale and tender where she sees it in the mirror.

She’s wasted enough time. Abandoning her reflection, she runs the shower hot until steam begins to pour out, strips down, and steps in. For a while she just stands there, staring at the wall and watching the water slide down in rivulets, letting it scald her a little until her skin adjusts, trying not to think of how the droplets remind her of falling tongues of flame. She forgot soap, but she doesn’t care. She didn’t come here to get clean. Her hand slides up to the wound again, presses it gingerly, then rests there to shield it from the water.

 _Two hands reaching out._

That was what Rose said, when Rey met her a few days ago. They chatted a while, traded some stories, compared their respective battle wounds. Rose was in far worse shape than Rey was then, but she seemed tough, if a little awestruck. She said the wound at least looked interesting, tried to guess what had made it, and then said that: “It looks like two hands reaching out.” It shook Rey a little in the moment, but she hasn’t thought of it again. 

Now she can’t stop thinking of it, and of what she saw when she and Ben touched hands. She recollects the anguish of having that conviction torn away when the future she saw did not immediately come to pass. The wound it left behind, unacknowledged until now, is still so raw she feels it almost physically, and she is suddenly overwhelmed.

Rey sinks to the floor of the shower and sits with her knees bent, her back curled against the wall. The connection endures, beneath the surface. Reminding her. Picking at her. It isn’t seamed into her face, a memento every time she looks in the mirror. Instead it is somehow worse. The living reminder of a past that can’t be reclaimed and a future she fears will never come to be. She shudders as a sob comes on in earnest, and she cries openly as the steam twists around her.


End file.
